Going for interview tomorrow at local blood bank. My nursing history includes 10 years of dialysis and 5 years of home health, so I have stuck a lot of needles in my career. But what else do I need to know to be a good candidate for hire??? I’m clueless because I’ve never been in a blood bank :o . I imagine my knowledge of machines and tubing and large bore needles may come in handy. I just don’t know what happens before and after they collect the blood. The red top tube is for the type and cross, and lavender is for an H and H, do they draw other tubes to test for Hepatitis, etc.? Any advice will be greatly appreciated, I really want to appear competent for this interview.
Does the blood bank have a website that you can look at before the interview? You may get some tips on procedure etc.
If not, here’s the site of the Australian Red Cross Blood Bank. I imagine that the general principles are the same everywhere.
Blood Bank tech chiming in: First of all, I must ask what type of blood bank? I’ve worked in many and they come in all sorts of different sizes. I’ll assume you’re not referring to a medium sized hospital, where the blood bank doesn’t require nurses because all the bloodwork is done by the lab and all their inventory is ordered and shipped from outside facilities where it is collected. So you’re either taking a job in a larger teaching hospital that requires nurses for collection of units of blood from donors or a completely independent collection… oops, gotta get back to work, I’ll post this so it’s in my subscription and write more later, congrats on the new opportunity.
At my blood bank, the nurses mostly do apheresis. Non-nurse phlebotomists do most of the simple blood collection. So any reading up on apheresis you can do is recommended.
Huh. I see the interview is today. Good luck, and I guess my post is too late to help.
Well, too late to help, I’ll just ask how the interview went.
I was going to mention what TroubleAgain mentioned, apheresis is a big deal if you’re working in a larger institution that has an outpatient transfusion area. This morning at my place we have an order for two plasma exchanges and 3 orders for the derivitive IVIG. The apheresis instrument is really cool. It draws whole blood from one arm, and then removes a certain component and then what’s not taken is transfused back into you simultaneously. For example, I mentioned those plasma exchanges; those patients will come in this morning have the pheresis machine remove all the plasma from their blood while we transfuse them with new donor plasma. This is done to remove harmful antibodies in the patient’s own blood.
While it sounds complicated, these instruments are not as complicated in premise as a dialysis instrument. Most of them are just specialized centrifuges that seperate the whole blood in the most traditional means we can think of.
Other than that it’s still all the traditional nursing duties of taking care of the patients while they’re here and making sure to fill in all the orders required. You said you’ve had 10 years of dialysis experience, so I think you’ll be all set with that.
So yah, how’d the interview go?